Plans are afoot in Cilycwm village to put part of the church
to secular use. This has made me think hard about how I feel about the church
and its place in our communities.
Being part of a religious community is something that has
been woven into the social fabric of
human life for as long as homo sapiens has been around. Until very recently various forms of religion offered
the only way we could come to terms with the mystery of our existence, and they
have always required their followers to believe in something – to have a creed.
The Church (in its broadest sense) has always been about belief. As a lifelong atheist I can only believe in things
for which I can see some evidence. If
something is mysterious I suspend my belief until better evidence becomes
available, and science has produced a rising tide of better evidence. Most of the mysteries of life have been unraveled
and this puts those who hold a religious faith in a very difficult position.
Faith – the belief in some inexplicable supernatural power which shapes our
lives – seems to me to be moving in two
opposing directions.
On one side we have the typical British village church with
its dwindling congregation of ageing believers, and on the other the aggressive
fundamentalist believers, the Tea Party Christians and the Muslim suicide
bombers. The village church congregations are dwindling because, in our
society, the science of evolution has moved into the mainstream. It now offers a completely convincing
explanation for all the complexities of life on earth. It is very difficult for
educated people in Western democracies to justify a belief in God in purely
rational terms.
Here in Wales we live in a society which is largely
tolerant, peaceful, secular, materialist and rational, and we are very
fortunate that we do. The attempts by Evangelist Christian groups to re-fill
the chapels have so far not succeeded. Even the old animosity between church
and chapel has largely died out. It is not uncommon for the small church and
chapel congregations to share the best building available to them. As in much
of Britain, churches and chapels are only full at the special times: funerals,
weddings, Christmas and Easter.
Why do so many of us suspend our disbelief on these
occasions? Some see this as a convenient hypocrisy, but I think it shows us
something very important. We all have an instinctive desire to celebrate the
important turning points in our lives with some kind of ceremony – something
which raises our spirits, heightens our emotions. We need a connection to the sublime, the holy
(a word derived from “whole”). This has always
been the function of Art, and it is no accident that Art and Religion have
historically been close bedfellows. Great
Art takes us out of ourselves, connects us to the universe, raises our spirits
(note the holy metaphor in “spirits”) and makes us feel that our lives have
purpose. Yet why should we feel obliged
to believe in something called God to make us whole? Isn’t the miracle of life on earth sublime
enough?
Increasingly in our society we are not obliged to believe,
but if we want the religious community to continue to relieve us of this obligation,
we should reciprocate: we should accept in humility that for very many of us
the sublime cannot be dislocated from the notion of God. In previous centuries it was commonplace for
Christians to persecute other Christians for heresy – for believing in a
different way. Even in places like Northern Ireland or the Vatican it would be
difficult to find anyone professing to be Christian who believes we should kill and torture other
Christians because they worship in a different way. Religious tolerance has
been one of the great achievements of our times, and if the biggest division
now is between the Religious and the non-Religious then the same spirit of
tolerance should operate. In such a climate it would be impossible to recruit
suicide bombers. I do not believe in the concept of evil, but it is hard to
find a better way to describe the mindset of those who indoctrinate suicide
bombers.
The whole idea of suicide bombers is totally alien to our
culture, so let us Thank God or Thank Goodness for that, and let us pray or
plan that it never takes root here.
